Group items tagged

How do chess players make decisions? How do they avoid the combinatorial explosion? How do we go from rooks and knights to abstract thought? What is abstract thought like? These are some of the questions involving the Capyblanca project. The name, of course, is a blend between José Raoul Capablanca, and Hofstadter's original Copycat Project implemented by Melanie Mitchell, which brought us so many ideas. Well, after almost 5 years, we have a proof-of-concept in the form of a running program, and we are GPL'ing the code, so interested readers might take it to new directions which we cannot foresee.

The key phrase is "forced browsing". Scientific discovery is often a story of serendipity, of stumbling on an idea that has been neglected or discarded (it's one of those remote Google search results that you don't bother to click on). The question is whether putting science on the internet makes such unexpected encounters less likely.

The most disruptive idea being explored by startups is to channel coal stack carbon dioxide emissions into water filled bags with carbon-eating algae which can re-purpose carbon and hydrogen into fatty acids which can be used to create liquid biofuels.

Welcome to DeepDebate! We are passionate about ideas and are exploring new ways to improve online conversations. In order to do this, we've built a framework which makes it easier for a very large number of people to create a structured conversation.

The idea behind wectar is the fusion of two worlds, dmoz.org (open directory project) and delicious.com. This fusion is seen by us as a mutual enrichment of two stages in the evolution of the world wide web. What makes both of these two great services for sure true pioneers of web 3.0 is their generosity of making their unique knowledge available for mashups like wectar. Obviously wectar couldn't be without this generosity. We hope that we can repay this kindness to some extend by promoting both services through our web site.

Immersive realism may be the "Holy Grail" of game development, but should it be? In this opinion piece, author and designer Lewis Pulsipher argues that most players don't want "role-fulfillment," in support of the idea that strong mechanics -- and even player design awareness -- is a more suitable goal.

This blog is a place for readers to discuss the beta version of our new book, "Evolving Collective Intelligence" by Douglas C. Engelbart, Valerie Landau, and Eileen Clegg. After reading the beta version, Do you have a quote to contribute? Clarifications on the content? An idea for another essay? Feedback will be input for our improved first edition, in keeping with Doug's philosophy of continuous improvement and collaboration. Please go to the "about" page.

NCBO Seminar Series talks occur via the Web and teleconference at 10:00AM, Pacific time, the 1st and 3rd Wednesday of every month. This series aims to showcase new projects, technologies and ideas in biomedical ontology by featuring the work of a different collaborator each session. It is open to anyone interested, regardless of location or affiliation.

Individual-intelligence research, from a neurological perspective, describes the cortex as a medium for performing conceptual abstraction and specification. This idea has been used to explain how motor-cortex regions responsible for different behavioral modalities such as writing and speaking can express the same general concept represented in the cortex. For example, the concept of a dog, abstractly represented in the higher-layers of the cortex, can either be written or spoken about depending on the context. Abstract models in the higher-layers propagate activation patterns down the cortical hierarchy to the desired region of the motor-cortex for worldly implementation. In this paper, the individual-intelligence framework is expanded to incorporate collective-intelligence within a hyper-cortical construct. This hyper-cortex is a multi-layered network used to represent abstract collective concepts. This collective-intelligence framework plays an important role in understanding how collective-intelligence systems can be engineered to handle collective problem-solving. To conclude the paper, five common problems in the scientific community are solved using an artificial hyper-cortex generated from digital-library metadata.

(from slashdot) "PGP and GnuPG have been utilizing webs of trust to establish authenticity without a centralized certificate authority for a while. Now, a new tool seeks to extend the concept to include scientific publications. The idea is that researchers can review and sign each others' works with varying levels of endorsement, and display the signed reviews with their vitas. This creates a decentralized social network linking researchers, papers, and reviews that, in theory, represents the scientific community. It meshes seamlessly with traditional publication venues. One can publish a paper with an established journal, and still try to get more out of the paper by asking colleagues to review the work. The hope is that this will eventually provide an alternative method for researchers to establish credibility."

We should be and we can be doing a much better job to predict and prevent pandemics. But the really bold idea is that we could reach a point-and this is a distant point in the future-where we become so good at this that we really reach a point where we have the "final plague," and where we are really capable of catching so many of these things that new pandemics become an oddity. I think that is something that we should certainly have as an ideal.

n the IS field there is a growing recognition of the importance of theorizing the IT artifact and its organizational and societal context from a pragmatic and action-oriented perspective. Over the years, a number of events and journal special issues have been devoted to this topic (e.g. the Language/Action Perspective workshops 1996-2005 and special issues of CACM and Data and Knowledge Engineering, the Understanding Sociotechnical Action workshops and special issue of IJTHI, the Action in Language, Organizations and Information Systems conferences and EJIS special issue, and the Pragmatic Web conference). The aim of SIGPrag is to provide a much needed centre of gravity and to facilitate exchange of ideas and further development of this area of IS scholarship.

I'm fascinated with the way that a bunch of old ideas floating around from the dot com era are back, and now succeeding. Many of these apps are explicitly social, and are benefitting from the larger user population and increased comfort - it took quite a while for Match.com to catch on, and sixdegrees had much of the Friendster model down by 1996 and flamed out anyway. One really interesting category of these v 2.0 apps is shared bookmarking, a la the service Backflip from Back in the Day. So, with a minimum of editorializing, here is a list of places doing some form of shared link management, which are providing some of Tom Coates' "user-friendly throw-aroundable clumps of groupness."

Named Graphs is the idea that having multiple RDF graphs in a single document/repository and naming them with URIs provides useful additional functionality built on top of the RDF Recommendations.

As a conversational process, the World Café is an innovative yet simple methodology for hosting conversations about questions that matter. These conversations link and build on each other as people move between groups, cross-pollinate ideas, and discover new insights into the questions or issues that are most important in their life, work, or community. As a process, the World Café can evoke and make visible the collective intelligence of any group, thus increasing people's capacity for effective action in pursuit of common aims.

The Coffee Shop as Social Gathering-Place: Chris Corrigan picks up on an idea in Architect Magazine on how coffee shops might morph into the business and community gathering places of the future. I recently predicted the end of offices, and with their demise will come a need for such f2f gathering spots, equipped with videoconferencing and screensharing and other social tools to allow others who can't attend to be part of the conversation.

Welcome to Blog Carnival! We love the idea of blog carnivals where someone takes the time to find really good blog posts on a given topic, and then puts all those posts together in a blog post called a "carnival".

On Clipmarks.com, you can see clips of text, images or video about all sorts of topics that other people find while surfing the web. The idea is that through each other, we can learn more, know more and enjoy more than we could possibly do alone. As you find people who post clips that interest you, make them a Guide. Think of your Guides as a team of web editors you choose to consistently deliver you clips of things they find on the web.

"The semantic web proposes to inject machine meaningful data into the existing human language oriented web. As part of this effort, on the semantic web, URIs are used to identify entities. But there is currently no standard way to specify what it is that any given URI is to identify, or to whom, or when. Recent work in linguistics offers ideas for a solution to this lack. It focuses on the pragmatics of actual language use among ensembles of people. Also, the World Wide Web provides a set of technologies, in the form of socially constructed web sites, that could be employed to provide a solution. In this paper, I suggest how such socially constructed web sites could be used to address the problem of establishing common ground among a community of machines of the referent of a URI used on the semantic web. The result is a proposal to automate social meaning by creating societies of machines that share knowledge representations identified by URIs."

What tagging does point to convincingly is the social aspect of naming. In a given natural language, many sorts of identifiers, such as common words, are socially centralized. Other sorts of identifiers, such as proper names, are socially decentralized, varying from local context to local context. Black has noticed a correspondence between this socially grounded identification process and the use of socially constructed Web sites.